Review

Queensland’s history is different in many respects from the older states, and similar only to Western Australia in features such as its vastness, its relative emptiness and its history as the last of the ‘frontier’ states. It is easy to caricature Queensland as historically and naturally conservative, even reactionary, by comparison to its more cosmopolitan, liberal and tolerant counterparts in the south-eastern corner of Australia. This is the state in which, if Henry Reynolds’s estimates are accepted (as they still generally are, despite the notorious efforts of Keith Windschuttle), half of the 20,000 Aborigines killed in violent conflicts with European settlers in Australia met their deaths. This is the state that gave us Joh Bjelke-Petersen and all the corruption that went with his government. And this is the state that was home to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, and that gave it twenty-three per cent of the vote and ten seats in the 1998 state election.

As I read this book, serious questions were being asked about the honour of three governments: the British, the US and our own. Did they all lie so as to justify war against Iraq? Honour still matters, even at a time when the word is not used as often as it once was. Michael Duffy’s book about John Macarthur, one of the best-known inhabitants of colonial Australia, constructs him as a ‘man of honour’. It ought to be topical.

Ross Fitzgerald’s book is timely, for two reasons. Five years having passed since the death of  B.A. Santamaria, an appropriate distance stands between the immediate obituaries and a better perspective on his impact on Australian politics. It is also nearly fifty years since the great Labor schism. A new generation of Australians has grown up for whom ‘The Split’ is not part of the political lexicon. The Pope’s Battalions reminds one of a time when this term required no explanation, just as ‘The Dismissal’ needs no explanation to Australians over a certain age.

Reading this new book in the cold midwinter of 2003, I stopped one night to watch the news; the lead  story was about the newly resumed dredging operations at the Murray Mouth, an hour or two south-east of Adelaide. The dredging is a temporary measure, a kind of emergency surgery to stop the river mouth silting up and closing altogether.

Despite Jeff McMullen’s assertion in the foreword to The Man Who Saw Too Much that books like this are rare, this is in fact the latest in a long line of books about Australian war and foreign correspondents, by which I mean photographers, cameramen and women, and cinematographers (the term preferred by David Brill), as well as journalists. In recent times, books by, or about, the adventurous boys – Damien Parer and Neil Davis (both role models for Brill), Richard Hughes (whom Brill met in later life), Wilfred Burchett and Hugh Lunn – have, thankfully, been joined by autobiographies of women journalists such as Irris Makler.

Jordie Albiston’s latest collection opens with a remarkable poem about a woman falling from the Empire State Building and falling, at the same time, through the story of her life:

In the air, a moment can take on the time centuries span.
She falls through former selves above a thousand heads.
No one looks up. No one looks towards the bright sedan.
Within a handful of time, it will be her crumpled bed.

The perils of a certain kind of historical writing are painfully demonstrated in The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, billed as ‘the life of Australian whaling captain, William Chamberlain: a tale of abduction, adventure and murder’.

According to the limited information available about Chamberlain, he had an exciting life. Born in Australia in 1803, he was for some reason taken away from his hometown of Port Jackson in 1811 on the Frederick. The French captured this whaling ship on its way back to England, and killed the captain. Chamberlain was taken prisoner with the rest of the crew, and was rescued by the British navy. He was cared for by a naval surgeon, who eventually sent him to school in Scotland for a couple of years. Later, he was on board one of the battleships that participated in the Battle of Algiers in 1816, where he was wounded. It was only then that it occurred to anyone to return the boy, now thirteen, to his family in Australia. After a few years, Chamberlain went to sea again, first on a sealing ship and then on a whaler. He worked his way up to become captain of a whaling vessel, married and had several children. He and his family settled in Hobart, where in 1856 his youngest son was raped and murdered by a ticket-of-leave convict. Chamberlain died in Hobart in 1870.

If it is inadvisable to judge a book by its cover, perhaps it is equally unreliable to judge one by its title. But The Complete Book of Great Australian Women set my teeth on edge before I’d turned the first page. What qualifies a woman for greatness? Great deeds? Great courage? Great neighbours? And wasn’t the point of feminist history not only to open up the list of historical actors but also to challenge the very principles of historical gatekeeping: professional merit, political influence, public stature? The subtitle certainly doesn’t contribute to more inclusive notions of historical agency and achievement. Like a human hydroelectric scheme, de Vries’s women struggle to overcome the many ‘natural’ barriers to female success, and, like the nation itself, emerge triumphant.

The editors of this book declare that cultural history is fashionable, so fashionable that it stands in for what might otherwise be known as ‘general history’ or even just ‘history’. ‘When historians set out to write the history of everything,’ they claim, ‘these days they are most likely to imagine themselves writing cultural history.’

Why, then, is it necessary to assemble a collection of essays on the subject? It cannot be simply to celebrate the triumph of this form of history, since many of the contributors are still urging its attractions. The purpose might be to demonstrate the range and accomplishment of cultural history in Australia, since the collection includes some distinguished local practitioners – except that their contributions to the genre are well established and readily available. Alternatively, such collections can provide the opportunity to consider the theory and method of cultural history, and quite a few of the contributors do so – but mostly with reference to their own practice.

Like celebrities in Daniel Boorstin’s celebrated definition, some years – 1066, 1492, 1914 – are famous for being famous. Just published is Christopher Lee’s 1603: A Turning Point in British History, which follows John Wills’s Global History of 1688. James Chandler’s magisterial ‘commentary on a moment in the history of a literary culture’, England in 1819, repeats for its title that of a Shelley sonnet reflecting on the state of the nation in the year of the Peterloo massacre. Freezing the chronological progression of ‘history’ at an arbitrarily constructed ‘moment of time’, date-based literary histories allow a detailed consideration of how texts relate to their contexts.